Kill the Dead(17)

Outside, a bar of cloud lay low on the horizon, like another hill behind the hills. The mountain glistened, cool and sculptured, in the preludes of the morning.

As she walked along the rims of the slopes, treading north, the dark started to lift, in level sweeps, like flocks of birds flying up from the land. These things were so known to her. The lift and fall of day and night, the mountain, the country. She seemed only a figment of everything that was, only a memory of some other girl who had lived long in this place.

From a rise, quite soon, she saw the stream shining before her.

The yellow asphodel of the spring was gone from its banks. She glanced about bewilderedly, searching for some token flower, but there were only summer daisies in the grass. Nor was the stream as clear as in the spring. It was tinged with the brown clay that lined the channel. Nor did it flow so swiftly as when the melted snow, from the high shelves of its source, ran with it.

Ciddey took off her shoes, as if she meant to go wading in the stream. She set them neatly, side by side, on the bank.

The night chill, retained by the water, made her gasp as she stepped into it. For an instant, she felt incapable of continuing the deed. She stood shivering balanced against the syrupy freezing push of the current, looking wildly about her. Almost at once, a man appeared on the rise beyond the bank, about eighty feet away. It was the man who had sung under her window the night before, who must have done so at the order of Parl Dro to distract her. Fate had directed him.

She stared at the man and he at her. Suddenly he began to wave his arms, one green, one red, and to shout. Then he began to rush toward her down the slope, and the instrument jounced behind him.

He must not reach her in time.

Ciddey let herself fall directly back into the stream. The cold liquid came over her face, entering her nostrils and eyes. She did not strike the stream bed hard, the water was too buoyant. Already it raised her and bore her forward. She was not yet leaden enough to sink and to lie still.

Her braids were coming undone. She should have rebound them. She had not thought to.

She had held her breath, but now she breathed, and let the stunning cold darkness into herself. She was so cold now that she no longer felt it at all.

Somewhere far away she heard the man scrabbling in the stream, not at the right spot, for the current had moved her quite some distance.

Everything slid away, almost gently now. All but one thing. She understood she must not let go of that.

The very last sight she had, before all human seeing went out of her, was of the two black eyes of Parl Dro. They seemed to draw her from herself, right out of her bursting, suffocating flesh. Her consciousness, narrowed to a thread, passed through them as through the eyes of needles. Her hatred was so fine, she felt a pang of exultation. Then she was a feather floating on a tide in darkness. And then she died.

Upstream, Myal Lemyal, plunging knee-high in the icy water, drenched himself and thrashed the shallow race with his hands. By the time he found her, he was already half mad.

He dragged her out onto the bank. Her face was swollen and pop-eyed, as if she had been strangled. He retched with terror, but threw her on this bloated face and tried to squeeze the water out of her.

Finally he gave over. He left her lying face down in a veil of pale hair. The soles of her small bare feet, very clean and faintly pink, flushed pinker as the sunrise burned down on them.

Myal sat on the bank some yards away from her, gnawing his nails. He did not look at her beyond intermittent, furtive glances. Eventually, he swung the musical instrument around on its sling into the crook of his shoulder.

He made a song for Ciddey Soban. He did not know how beautiful it was. But the instrument had been wetted by his career through the stream, and some of the strings sagged and gradually became flat. If his father had been with him, Myal would have been beaten.

In the end, Myal stopped playing. He put his arms around the instrument, hugging it tightly, and watched the stream going by.

An hour or so later, the cold in his still dripping boots and shirt started to wriggle its way under his ribs and spine. He sneezed and rubbed his hand across his eyes and stood up. And found he was standing on one of Ciddey’s small shoes.

He walked away from the stream slowly.

He could hear cows mooing like bassoons across the curves of the land. The odour of turf and flowers became an irresistible series of irritations in the passages behind his nose and throat, and he sneezed again and cursed himself and the world, and trudged once more toward the eastern snarl of the road.

CHAPTER FOUR

Five miles east of the village, the landscape began to flow steadily downward. Deep valleys appeared and shimmering ravines. Trees like poles, each with a solitary rounded cloud of foliage smouldering at its top, led in avenues along the crests of ridges, or by the misty lanes of faraway, indeterminate rivers.